Enola Gay was the B-29 bomber that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The aircraft was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress assigned to the 393rd Bombardment Squadron. Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted it during the mission from Tinian in the Mariana Islands. Tibbets named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, and had the name painted near the cockpit shortly before the mission.
Little Boy was a uranium-235 atomic bomb and became the first nuclear weapon used in warfare. Enola Gay released it over Hiroshima at approximately 8:15 a.m. local time. The aircraft later served as a weather reconnaissance plane for the Nagasaki mission, while Bockscar carried Fat Man. The restored Enola Gay is displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.